


Drought (or, Tezuka vs. Ponta)

by atria



Series: Tezuka vs. Puberty [4]
Category: Tennis no Oujisama | Prince of Tennis
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-04
Updated: 2018-11-04
Packaged: 2019-08-17 13:10:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16517096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atria/pseuds/atria
Summary: There's a flashback clip where Tezuka is very clearly drinking grape Ponta in freshman year. This is about how Tezuka went from an ichinen not unlike Ryoma to grumpy teen to the sensuously growly team captain we know and love.





	Drought (or, Tezuka vs. Ponta)

Tezuka grew up enviably. The chart of his height in junior high was a sine curve that went only upward, the sort of thing a spinster math teacher could call beautiful. The sharp, arrogant look in his eye took on stature, gravitas as he peered lower and over thicker glasses. His face found its point spring of junior year so that girls in his grade, stunned by the passage of sweet roundness to rigour, walked into pillars or teachers as they did double-takes over their shoulders or blinked into consciousness mid-look as sakura softly folded into their faces. 

But the gods of puberty giveth and they taketh away. Early in his thirteenth summer, Tezuka woke before dawn, cleaned his teeth, greeted his mother at breakfast and found his voice had gone. More accurately, it squawked. She laughed and cupped his ear and insisted on taking a picture; he, skeptical, wanted to point out the redundancy of a photograph without audio but was stunned by the loss of his ability to grumble. Instead he squeaked. He stuttered. Sometimes, against his will, his voice would trill when posed with a question in class or tasking a lazy ichinen with a drill.

His admirers laughed, delighted that their idol was becoming equal. Tezuka, always reserved, grew guarded and terse. He wore a cap over his eyes in hopes it would hide the blush on his cheek until Eiji, one of his least favourite yearmates if only for the fact that puberty had of late left him alone, stole it off his head mid-practice and declared Tezuka’s hat hair his new pet, a furry golden-brown lump he christened Kiwi. Fuji took more photos.

Tezuka ditched the hat and restricted his conversation to starvation levels. All summer, as sweat dripped thick down his peers’ bodies and ice and sugar melted in their mouths, Tezuka was in famine, manufactured drought. He gave up popsicles and Ponta, afraid he would make his throat hoarser than it was. He stopped leading drills or riling up the opponents, settling for calling laps in a voice as stiff as a board and as likely to creak. Fuji, exploitative, ran more miles in one month than he did in the last year combined before Tezuka cottoned on to the tactic. 

“Leave it, they can’t take you seriously anyway,” buchou said with an idle hand on his shoulder, and Tezuka felt the heat of summer and the blanch of anger and the twinge in the hurt muscles as one object, a single ruined sense. All summer he felt like the hare the tortoise overtook, stunned by his unsuspected deficiency, sensing in his worse moments that it had to be moral, somehow innate. He never quite convinced himself it wasn’t why they lost Nationals.

Summer went, harvest came, and Tezuka once again was a child of grace. He made council president and team captain, top in history and maths and, puzzlingly, home economics for boys. At his founder’s day speech his voice was dark and smooth as the nice oak lecturn they unearthed for the occasion, rich and heavy as good cocoa. His mother teared, his peers cheered, and even the class salutatorian clapped without irony.

But the damage was done. Tezuka ingested the silence and seriousness, took it into his body. Something had ruptured between him and the world. He was set differently in his bones when the new year’s round of freshmen and sakura arrived at once. So much so he barely recognised the skinny boy with the cap and the scowl as his own kind.

It wasn’t till he was sixteen that he tasted again the sweetness of gratuitous sugar. The mouth he touched was chapped and a little rough, the inside damp and hot. Tezuka’s face flushed with new courage, awe that he was permitted to touch here, and here, and here. He dared himself to lick. The cave of the mouth was thick with sweetener and warmly sour in a way that was all body, only real.

“Ponta,” he said as he drew away, and “Grape,” Ryoma agreed, and the depth and flavour of his satisfaction was gravel, rock sugar. Tezuka wondered at it. All the ways one could drink after a long drought, the places one could touch and be touched.


End file.
